The Pop Sensation that Bieber Discovered

How Madison Beer's teenage dream came true

The bright-eyed, energetic singer Madison Beer sat in the hair and makeup chair eating some sort of chocolate covered waffle dish and, in between bites, she talked a mile a minute. “They want to give me a more natural look,” the up-and-coming pop star said. The 16 year-old from Long Island burst into fame when Justin Bieber tweeted a video of her singing, similar to the way Bieber himself was put on the map by Usher. “Do you have any nail polish remover?” she said, looking down at her extra long painted nails. As we searched for the nail polish remover, Beer told us how her fairly common teenage dream one day became a reality.

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Azim Haidaryan

“In February—it was actually leap year of 2012—I posted a YouTube video. It was a Bruno Mars mash-up. I literally sat down and put some of Bruno Mars’ songs together into one song. It was really, really cool and I wanted to post it for fun. It wasn’t serious at all. I was bored and wanted to post a YouTube video. About two weeks later, my mom got an email from Scooter Braun asking to meet with me in the city.”

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Azim Haidaryan

Soon after, Beer was signed to Island Def Jam. Again, she gained Bieber’s attention once again with two more videos. One was a Carly Rae Jepsen cover and the other, a cover of Etta James’ “At Last,” which undeniably proved her singing cred, though the young talent admits to having little musical training. “He was promoting me. I was freaking out. I was super young. It was the craziest thing in a million years. I never thought for a second that I was anything for him to tweet about. I was so surprised and grateful. It all just went from there.”

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Azim Haidaryan

Three years later, she’s making music every day and on the set of CR Fashion Book wearing J.W. Anderson, which, she’ll be the first to say isn’t the kind of fashion that she naturally goes for. She likes her favorite pair of ripped jeans, she always has a killer blowout, and long eyelashes thickly with layered mascara. That said, she’s absolutely stunning. Her fashion and beauty taste is right in line with most American 16 year-olds, but her taste in music is as sophisticated as it is varied. “I love every kind of music and I listen to it all day long. It consumes my life.” She has spent a lot of time listening to Etta James, Whitney Houston, and The Beatles—what she calls “older artists” because it gives her a sense of what well-respected artists were doing before today’s explosion of pop. “They made music what it is.”

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It’s always a surprise when your dream comes true.

Even though Beer got one of the luckiest breaks that the industry has seen, it hasn’t kept her from working tirelessly to keep her momentum going. Whether it’s to make new music or to work on her voice, she seems to always be pushing herself and isn’t short on the kind of superhuman energy that it takes to do that. “My whole life, I was always into music. I always wanted to do this. It’s always a surprise when your dream comes true. I wanted to be discovered, so the fact that this happened to me and that I’m in the studio making music every day…doing what I love…is insane.” The more we listen to Madison (that Etta James cover!), the more sane her discovery seems.

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